Offices for those who don't have one

''Co-working spaces'' provide a desk, more for business travelers

New York Times

Published 3:46 pm, Monday, February 24, 2014

Photo: STUART ISETT

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Chris Hammersley, director of e-commerce and online marketing for ClickSafety.com, who works full time out of Office Nomads, a coworking space, in Seattle, Jan. 28, 2014. The concept of co-working, in which independent workers share office space, is being expanded to provide work spaces on the road. (Stuart Isett/The New York Times) ORG XMIT: XNYT110 less

Chris Hammersley, director of e-commerce and online marketing for ClickSafety.com, who works full time out of Office Nomads, a coworking space, in Seattle, Jan. 28, 2014. The concept of co-working, in which ... more

Photo: STUART ISETT

Offices for those who don't have one

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Joe Bunner, a sales executive from Austin, Texas, recently found himself in Denver for the day, with no place to work after a meeting had been canceled. "I didn't want to go back to the hotel and get holed up in that box all day," said Bunner, who works for Dynamic Signal, a marketing company.

Then he heard about Creative Density, a co-working space nearby that provides a desk, Wi-Fi, meeting rooms and other office amenities. "I immediately felt at home," he said.

His entree was the Coworking Visa, one of a growing number of programs that help business travelers who are members of a co-working space gain access to others when they are on the road.

"It's a simple idea," said Jacob Sayles, co-founder of Office Nomads, a co-working space in Seattle, and of the Coworking Visa. "It's not a shared membership among spaces; there's no exchange of money," he said. "It's a declaration of an open-door policy."

Members can travel anywhere in the world after contacting participating spaces directly, and work, typically for up to three days, without charge. They enjoy the same amenities of their home spaces, including good coffee and camaraderie. "We accept them as our own," Sayles said. Regular members pay to join their home spaces; costs typically vary by level of use.

More Information

Co-working took hold in the past decade on the West Coast to accommodate the growing number of independent workers who wanted to escape the loneliness of working at home. Several years later, the Coworking Visa emerged as an informal exchange for regional spaces. Today, it has more than 450 locations in 52 countries; 179 are in the United States, Sayles said.

Conventional office rentals and coffee shops (where even the most adept at working on the road report frustration with unpredictable Wi-Fi and noise) typically provide little opportunity to connect, Sayles said.

"The cross-pollination of ideas is really the valuable part of co-working," he said. "The energy is completely different."

Oren Salomon, owner of Fort Work, a co-working space in Dallas, said, "The Coworking Visa is almost like a built-in focus group."

Workers share their local knowledge with out-of-towners, like advice on where to take a client for dinner. "It's this implied boots on the ground," Salomon said. He is developing the Open Coworking Map, to be released online next month, which will eventually show locations for co-working spaces worldwide, including those in the visa program.

Chris Hammersley, director of e-commerce and online marketing for ClickSafety.com, works full-time out of Office Nomads in Seattle and is a frequent visa user. "It's not like just renting a desk in an office." he said. "It's instant colleagues. It gives you a quick family."

The program has been invaluable, Hammersley said. A space in Chicago, for example, did not hesitate recently to give him and his colleagues a conference room for the entire day. In November, he said, co-workers in Vancouver, British Columbia, shared what they knew "about the latest cupcake shop and other offbeat places not in guidebooks," as well as their weekly bonding event: home-brew happy hour, in which they shared their favorite beers.

But despite the low-key atmosphere, boundaries are respected. Security is a factor for Hammersley, who avoids working in public places where the Wi-Fi may be vulnerable to hacking. "I'm dealing with my company's sensitive financial information," he said. "A secure connection is primary."

Beth Buczynski, a Colorado-based freelance writer and editor, said the networking potential was an unexpected benefit of using the visa. During a cross-country trip, "co-working spaces were kind of an oasis for me; it was instant community," she said, providing not only an escape from the RV and a place to write, but valuable contacts as well. Some co-workers in Cincinnati; Des Moines, Iowa; Omaha, Neb.; and other cities with whom she stayed in contact helped promote her recently published book through social media and blog posts.

Evona Niewiadomska had a similar experience traveling through Europe for nine months last year, in Spain, Germany, Italy, Poland and Finland. She credits her co-working contacts at home in Boston and abroad with providing the referrals and assistance to establish a freelance graphic design career and a startup, Undiscovered Kitchen, a digital marketplace for artisanal food. "Everything around me supported and encouraged the leap," she said.

An estimated 207,000 members work in nearly 4,400 co-working spaces worldwide; within the last 12 months, the number of spaces has increased by 81 percent, and members by 89 percent, according to Deskmag, a Berlin-based online magazine about co-working.

"Co-working is a window onto the future of work," said Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, an independent research and consulting firm in California. The number of independent workers has grown about 6 percent a year in the last five years, he said, adding, "It's growing much more rapidly than the traditional work force and will continue to do so."

Emergent Research and Deskmag estimate that up to 10 percent of co-workers use spaces when they travel.